This is my blog. So far most of the entries are about sports. Please check out my autism site at www.coachmike.net and my photography site at www.mikefrandsen.net. Please also see my sports articles at http://www.examiner.com/sports-in-washington-dc/mike-frandsen and http://bleacherreport.com/users/583899-mike-frandsen, my autism articles at http://www.examiner.com/dc-in-national/mike-frandsen, and www.myredskinsblog.com. By Mike Frandsen.

Progress of Children with Autism

How much can children with autism learn? It’s a question I get a lot, as a person who provides therapy to kids with autism to improve their academic, social, and athletic skills. The answer is that all children with autism can learn. Some make amazing progress; for others the progress is much slower.

I’m listing below a couple of examples of students who have made excellent progress in all areas. They are an eight-year old boy and a seven-year old boy I worked with who both made amazing progress in a short period of time. (The greatest example of improvement that I am aware of is a teenage boy who I have been working with for five years. I’m going to compile a before and after list of skills and behaviors. This kind of progress is truly inspiring for parents who have young children who are worried about what the future holds).

It’s always the child himself or herself who deserves the most credit for learning. The parents, of course, also play a huge role. Other than that, it’s a team effort, with teachers and home therapists making contributions to the child’s success.

Experience has shown that children learn best when subjects are integrated, rather than splitting them up into different areas. I believe that in the future, a typical session will be run like this: one-third academics and cognitive skills, one-third social skills and functional life skills, and one-third sports, exercise, and motor skills.

Each area builds on the others and makes all learning more effective so that the child can use skills in a natural environment. Pathways in the brain are developed to work in conjunction with each other, not in separate areas. Interventions should be meaningful to the child, rather than just memorizing information. Kids aren’t robots and neither are the people who work with them. It’s not the number of hours that are spent learning. It’s how efficient those hours are.

Area

Progress for a high functioning 8-year old boy with autism during a 7-month period

Math

Improved ability in:

place value

addition, subtraction and early multiplication

addition: he improved from mastering sums of 9 to sums of 14

subtraction: he improved from mastering 5 –x to 12 – x

multiplication: he improved from nothing to up to mastering 3 x 4

Expanded notation

Word problems – he was terrible at them at the start, and by June he had mastered several different types. He learned to draw to find answers to problems.

Learned the basics of fractions

Addition carrying the one

Counting mixed coins

Skip counting

measuring

English

Learned how to do opposites

Improved reading comprehension (I had time to work on this with him 20 min. a week. The other company had 20 hours a week. He would have made more improvements with me with the same amount of time).

Improved on capitalization.

Improved on spelling.

Maps

Improved ability to find spots on the map. Learned directions better than before. Learned most of the states, which he didn’t have before.

Time

Improved ability to tell time by counting by 5’s on clock.

Sports

The neighborhood kids respect him a lot more now than before because he can play sports a lot better and can handle his emotions better.

He had major tantrums at the start but improved a lot. Showed him how he looks through video, helping him see how others see him.

He became very competitive, really wanting to win. At the start he didn’t care if he won.

He learned to play defense where his role was to stop the other team so he became less reliant on needing to score to be happy.

He understood the rules much better in soccer, hockey and basketball, than before and he improved in his knowledge of football and baseball though he still has a long way to go.

He became interested in local pro sports after reading about them on the web and going to the Freedom game.

Learned not to run into the street after the ball.

Ice skating – though he can’t glide, the first time he fell 100 times, the most recent time he fell less than 10 times.

We did exercises based in yoga, relaxation, and balance to help him focus.

Most of the sports we did happened from April through June – we accomplished most of this in three months.

Emotions

He learned that mistakes help you learn.

He can self-regulate better by taking deep breaths, counting, exercising, or talking about it. This is a very important skill to have. One that many kids cannot master.

Strangers

He knows he can’t sit in the lap of anyone except his parents.

He still has a long way to go but has learned that you can’t say hi to adults who you don’t know.

Pretend and Abstract Play

Improved spontaneity, imagination, and creativity by using jokes and pretend stories. He improved his ability to make up stories and use symbolic play.

Games

Improved ability to sit down and play scrabble. He had a terrible temper at first but now can play an entire game somewhat independently. Improved spelling through scrabble. Introduced other games.

Social skills

Improved social skills through play dates.

Talked about bullying

Overall

He had his best session ever on 9/21. We had a lot of momentum and things were only going to get better.

Area

Progress for 7-year old boy with autism with severe developmental delays including language

Overall

He has made a lot of progress. I have only been working regularly with him doing two-hour sessions for 3 months. Before then we did 1.5 hours sessions sporadically.

Books

He is able to sit for 15 minutes at a time reading books with me and is interested in looking at books (colors, foods) by himself. Before he would not sit still at all. He can now read different books with help, looking at words instead of just pictures. Once we read 7 books back to back.

I also reinforced many of the words from the VBA team’s list by having him review flashcards.

Though he can read the words “Mommy,” “Daddy,” etc., he’s having trouble associating them with the pics on the flashcards, showing how important it was to make those flashcards.

Typing

He wouldn’t do it at all at the start. Now he has no problem sitting for 15 min. The work paid off as he knows where the keys are now. Typing has helped him read his name and understand that the answer to how old he is is 7. It has helped him learn to read Mommy, Daddy, his sister’s name and his name. He has taken my finger and guided me to the letters before, showing joint attention, which is crucial to learning. Typing is NOT meant as an alternative method of communication for him, but it will help him spell and read words, then phrases, then sentences, and will ultimately help him speak better because he will understand language more. Typing is one way to help kids generalize language – to learn words in several different ways rather than just reading sight words. It also helps with fine motor skills.

Intraverbals

In Aug. he mastered saying his name and 7 in response to “What’s your name?” and “How old are you?” but he lost them because of confusion with what VBA program has done.

Soccer

He can kick back and forth on the grass. He can dribble the length of the field and then kick it hard into the net. He can kick it into the goal over and over. During the last two sessions I had him kicking back and forth with his brother, which is a huge milestone socially.

Basketball

He can now shoot from several feet away rather than just dunk.

Trampoline

He can play catch while jumping, kick the ball back and forth while on the trampoline, and stop and do imitative exercises, which he could not do before.

Imaginative and Pretend play

He has a much stronger interest in stuffed animals now. At first he had no interest. Then he would smile and laugh and say “frog” or “bug.”This is very important to learn how to play and think abstractly.

Oral Motor

He learned to imitate by using his tongue and lips. In June he was able to blow bubbles but before he couldn’t.

Handwriting

He is getting better at tracing numbers and letters. Before he couldn’t do it at all. He can’t do it independently but he in some cases is doing part of it himself. He shows more interest in it.

Math

He is very interested in counting though he loses track/needs help after about 15. He has started addition. His attention span has increased during math.

Numbers and shapes

He has completely mastered numbers 1-10 and shapes with beanbags. Determined he may be partly color-blind.

Spelling

Spellmaster – He has chosen the right tiles to spell certain words. Using different ways to read is helping generalize (flashcards, books, typing, spellmaster, etc.)

Other

He has been very engaged, with lots of two way interaction. The rapport we have is very important to learning because kids will learn more when they are motivated and having fun. He shows a lot of joint attention: Joint attention refers to the propensity of a child to engage another’s attention to share enjoyment of objects or events. Children display joint attention skills by initiating bids to others to pay attention to what they are attending to and by following the line of visual regard and point gestures of a social partner (Mundy & Thorp). Thus, children both initiate and respond to joint attention bids.

Joint attention behaviors represent a critical area in typical development. Joint attention skills have been found to be concurrently related to receptive and expressive language skills among typically-developing children. In addition, research indicates that joint attention is important for the development of a host of other, later-emerging, skills, such as more complex expressive language, symbolic play, and theory of mind.

Initiating joint attention, shared engagement, two-way interaction, connecting on an emotional level is how kids learn – this isn’t just from Greenspan but this is well known – this is taught at Johns Hopkins – and the relationship a child has with the therapist is very important to learning. His words are very emphatic after we do something he enjoys. He shows a lot of enthusiasm, also helpful to learning. He has the ability to go with the flow. These are all elements of RDI that he has shown for the past four months. We have been doing RDI type games in a natural environment already. He has not cried significantly with me since 6/21.

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This entry was posted on December 23, 2009 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Autism, Disabilities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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